Forum:Should we list the genre of a fanfiction on the fanfiction page or not?
I think we should add the genre, that way anybody can find out if it's a comedy or a drama or a tragedy.Bronyman 00:10, May 28, 2012 (UTC)Bronyman : I see three problems with this. One is that the major fanfic repositories have conditioned people to the wrong idea of genres. "sad" and "funny" are moods, not genres, and stuff like "random" and "grimdark" are tags. The second is that some stories just don't fit only one genre/descriptor (but listing more than one would make the column kind of useless for sorting purposes); consider Spitfire's Day Off. The third problem is that not every reader would agree on how to label a specific story. We would need to come up with objective metrics to describe stories properly, and that is difficult. : We could, I suppose, add whether a fanfic page has a mature content template, but that's not quite what you asked. Plus, there are fics with that template which are nevertheless comedies (like Skittles and spiderses). --Tulipclaymore 00:54, May 28, 2012 (UTC) :: Yeah, that last point was my problem with the whole idea; we'd have to come up with a consistent, objective system for describing the stories, plus with the stories with more than one genre/mood/whatever, we'd have to determine which genre the story is most in, which would be even more difficult, I think. -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 02:35, May 28, 2012 (UTC) After not thinking about this at all for a week, inspiration suddenly struck me earlier today. Determining the genre is problematic, but what shouldn't be is the tone of a piece. Since the intention behind the earlier proposal seemed to be to make clear which stories aren't dark, a binary distinction can be made: a story is either obviously light-hearted (in which case it gets that symbol), obviously sad and/or dark (in which case it gets the other symbol), or neither/subject to interpretation (in which case it gets no symbol). Example. The images are for demonstration purposes only, of course, and would be switched out with something more intuitive and more easily readable (I'm currently thinking of solid circles). They would also be incorporated into a template so the code doesn't look like such a mess. --Tulipclaymore 05:23, June 7, 2012 (UTC) :That sounds like an exellent idea. However, I think solid circles are a little too general. Perhaps we should use say: A slimey face for light-hearted articles and a sad face for darker ones? Abcron 05:33, June 7, 2012 (UTC) ::I'm impressed; it looks good to me. And of course, we'll only need to decide on pics for the "tone" column, I'd image, since the mature content sign/work in progress guy are already in common usage around the wiki, so people should recognize what those mean. And what did you have in mind for solid circles? Black for dark stories, and white (or a similarly light color) for lighthearted? Perhaps we could use a bold black capital "D" for dark stories, and perhaps a bold white capital "L" for lighthearted? -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 06:19, June 7, 2012 (UTC) :::I'm open to smiley faces, but my concern is that people will mistake it for a rating (good story, bad story). An abstract image would force people to hover and find out what it means. My original idea was a sun and a raincloud cutie mark, which would be pretty unambiguous, but I'm afraid that's going to be too busy for a 15px graphic. I wouldn't use letters; the distinction is between "light-hearted" and "not light-hearted", and a sad story does not necessarily have to be dark. As for the colours, I don't know yet. Maybe grey and light orange; it has to be something that doesn't needlessly discriminate against the colourblind but remains easily distinguishable from the background and the symbols in the other columns. --Tulipclaymore 06:29, June 7, 2012 (UTC) ::::How about we put a simple sun thumbnail for light-hearted stories and a simple cloud for not light-hearted ones? This way they are different shapes. Abcron 08:34, June 7, 2012 (UTC) :::::Yeah, the Celestia cutie mark that I currently have scaled down to 19px would work for the sun, right? And then it'd be a simple matter to scale a raincloud cutie mark, or whatever, down to a similar size. -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 08:35, June 7, 2012 (UTC) ::::Sure, if you can make it work. I would prefer a more generic cutie mark than Celestia's, though, hers is unique. I attempted to take one of the suns from Merry May's cutie mark and produce a transparent png, but the results were... not encouraging when scaled down. An actual vector graphic (svg) would be best, but that's beyond my limited capabilities. --Tulipclaymore 08:56, June 7, 2012 (UTC) :::::Alright, I have a friend on the FiM wiki who, for the most part, handles making the actual emotes for chat, both on that wiki and this wiki. I'll ask him, see if he can do anything about it. -- This is Jonny Manz, signing 09:00, June 7, 2012 (UTC)